Pressing Ahead: 175th Anniversary for Schuler

Metalforming press manufacturer Schuler AG is celebrating its 175th year in business in 2014. Louis Schuler founded the company in 1839 as a metalworking shop in Göppingen’s Sauerbrunnengasse. Beyond any reasonable expectation, the workshop has become a global corporation with sales of almost €1.2 billion.

“There have been many milestones in Schuler’s success over the past 175 years,” stated CEO Stefan Klebert, “and very few companies in Germany can look back on such a long and successful history.”

Less than half of all German companies reach their 10th anniversary, the group pointed out, and so to mark the occasion, Schuler’s celebrations will include a special event for employees at its headquarters in Göppingen, Germany, in July.

The company also prepared a presentation to document 175 small and large developments that have shaped Schuler over the centuries.

These include, for example, the moment in 1852 when founder Louis Schuler – inspired by the Great Exhibition in London one year previously – decided to dedicate his future to the construction of machines for sheet metal processing. However, he himself could no longer witness his company’s own exhibit at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900: the world’s first transfer press. Over the following years, the company’s headcount grew to 1,000. With a car body press for Opel in 1924, Schuler began supplying the fledgling auto industry, which is still its most important customer today.

After the Second World War, Schuler was the first company in West Germany’s American sector to receive an export license. The painstaking reconstruction work was rewarded: in 1961, sales reached 100 million deutschmarks, in 1970 they exceeded 200 million. At the same time, the company drove its internationalization with the foundation of subsidiaries in Brazil and North America, for example, followed by China and India in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, Peugeot launched production on the first crossbar transfer press, with suction-cup tooling supplied by Schuler. Further innovations in recent years, such as Compact-Crossbar presses, ServoDirect and TwinServo technologies, have emphasized Schuler’s leading position in the field of metalforming. This is also reflected by its business success: in 2012, the Schuler Group posted sales of more than one billion euros.

“Over the past years we have achieved a level of growth and earnings of which we can be justly proud,” stated CEO Stefan Klebert. “We therefore want to celebrate this 175th anniversary together with our employees and look forward to a year full of exciting and entertaining moments.”